The Joy of Adventure, Cold Air on your Face...

It's late, somewhere close to midnight and the holes in my cherry-print flats are mashing dirt into my toes.  We walk by the roadside, this three lane concrete lizard that arcs it's back through the middle of suburban Sydney.  On this stretch of road, so like other stretches of over-expensive, under-maintained highway, we could be anywhere.  A girl and a boy.  a red jacket.  A half-empty bottle of coke.
    It is thick night and the cars that normally clog this road like so many grimy scales have thinned to a trickle.  Wild rabbits come out of hiding.  The moon, almost full, glows out from beneath the purple halo of intermittent cloud.  Overhanging branches scratch at our shoulders as we scrape past.  It is not quiet, but it is calm.
   We know this road and yet we don't know it.  Four years I had sped along, swept along, ten minutes with my eyes closed and my headphones in, pressed against the window of a bus.  I had traveled this road every day for different reasons.  I had stared at this road through different emotions.  I remember the red lane through pure joy and laughter, glimpsed for a moment with friends.  The bus stations with frustration, exhaustion, and stress.  The grass by the bridge watched through the intense concentration of tears down a window pane...
   And yet we did not know it.  Though we had ridden it every day, had held every conversation we deemed possible while pounding over it with heavy tires, we had not for one second known it.  We could not, for how could we?  We had not smelled the air once the cars had passed, nor had we felt the way the ground cracked and bumped and rolled beneath our feet.  We had not the chance to feel one moment of that road with the beat of our own physical lives and yet we knew the road by name.  We were certain we knew all the places it led.
   We had walked this night, though the trains were running and we had paid for our tickets.  We had walked because the air was fresh and the night was clear and our love was strong.  It had not taken much thought.  A simple step, and then another and off we went, into the dark and away from the station.  We cut through the university and counted the rabbits.  We took a moment to photograph, in our minds, the way the campus looked with its new half-built buildings, so changed and yet still changing.  In the quiet, in the dark, we had the time to appreciate the transience of the space I had called home and work for so many years and we could walk slowly amongst it, void of cars, void of people.  A beating and impermanent space.
   Coming to the road we could see, for the first time, the way the grass grew in pits and pockets on the sidewalk.  We could note the ways in which the rubbish and debris tossed from windows came to gather in the edges of retaining walls like gaudy jewelery.  We could experience, for the first time, the heart-thudding rush as we dashed along the bus lane having been forced off the shrinking footpath.  We would flit, quickly across the road into the shadow of the bush, safe from the danger of passing cars.
   It was here we found the secret steps.  It was here we found the hidden walkway and darted through the bush that looked like jungle.  Here, we came out at a private driveway and slipped quietly past monolithic houses.  Here I checked my feet for leeches while Matt walked ahead, striding with a giant stick as though he were a sherpa.
   In time, we were back in town, back to the houses and streets we knew well.  But we were different.  We lumbered home, strolling out of the wood like we'd come down from a mountain.  Red-cheeked and dry-eyed we came home, more alive than we had been that day.  We felt as though we had seen a new land, as though we had discovered something that no one else would ever see.  And though thousands of people will pass that road today and tomorrow, and for many years to come, it seems true that few will ever really see.  They will not know the air or the smell or the feel of the wind, nor will they know the fear of the cars or the joy of stepping into the unknown.  For those that never walk the road, never have the time or take the time, there will be no secret stairway, no hidden walkway, no jungle bush, no mystery and no magic.  There will be only petrol and congestion, stereos and radios and the bounce of an engine.  There will be only the disconnection of the drive.

Why Synesthetics?

Synesthesia has been known to medical discourse for roughly 200 years.  The first known publication, written by Francis Galton, was published in 1880, though alternative accounts note medical references that date back as far as 1735 (Ramachandran & Hubbard, Castel).  Suggestions that interest synesthesia is a long spanning occurrence persists outside of medical discourse however, suggesting that sensory immersion and its effects on subjectivity is of continuing relevance to the field of philosophy and cultural theory.  John Harrison notes the history of references pertaining to the topic of synesthesia can be found to date back as far as 6th Century, BC, where suggestions of sensory synthesis can be found in the work of Pythagoras (Harrison).

   From a medico-scientific perspective, synesthesia has been historically difficult to study and thus difficult to legitimate due to the fact that its 'symptoms' are radically varied, difficult to quantify and difficult for patients to explain in any consistent 'objective' manner (Cytowic).  The reportedly highly subjective nature of synesthesia causes difficulty for medico-scientific frameworks discursively reliant on physiological empirical proof and thus, the subjective, metaphor heavy (and in many cases metaphor necessary) attempts to explain subjective synesthetic accounts according to a language structure incapable of supporting cross-modal descriptions of experience may explain the tendency for the occurrence of synesthesia to be historically medically and scientifically dismissed.  Nevertheless, synesthesia has encountered a renaissance in recent years, likely due to the advanced capacity of new technology for diagnostic purposes, along with attitude shifts regarding subjectivity and identity that have occurred in the last several decades.

   Synesthesia causes us to ask poignant questions about the nature of subjectivity and identity.  Synesthesia, as a neurological phenomenon, asks us to reconsider the ways in which we conceive of ourselves; our body and our subject, through senses.  Synesthesia challenges binary discourses of reason, and thus, challenges a multiplicity of binary structures that take legitimacy from the binary that places reason over emotion, for example, the binary that associates the masculine with reason, thereby oppressing the feminine according to the standards set by the reason/emotion structure.  Synesthesia forces us to face the stereotypes, boundaries and restrictions that we have been self-imposing and upholding through discursive construction and repetition for hundreds of years.  Using synesthetics; applying the theoretical challenge to writing and language that synesthesia presents, can help us to rethink, re-evaluate and rewrite personal expression in ways that relish in the multiple individual quirks of personal expression.

   Synesthesia is far more than a neurological condition, and more intensely experienced than an over-active imagination.  Synesthetics, inspired by synesthesia, give way to a multiplicity of ways in which we can extend and expand on what we think we know about language, and in turn, what we think of ourselves.  This is the basic principle upon which my honours thesis was founded, and it is the current that beats throughout all of my work.  The novel is a dying art if we cannot seek to make it more than what it has become.  This is the hope behind synesthetics.  To question and expand; to create/re-create out of the remnants of a dusty and tired literary tradition, something anew. 

This entry is titled, why synesthetics?  The answer is, why not?